BOSTON, MA – Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney announced today, June 30, that the team has signed Adam McQuaid to four year contract extension through the 2018-19 season at an NHL cap figure of 2.75 million per year.

In his sixth season with Boston, McQuaid competed in 63 games, recording one goal and posting six assists with 85 penalty minutes. In total, the 28-year-old blueliner has played in 283 games at the NHL level -- all with Boston -- racking up 9-34=43 totals, while amassing 430 penalty minutes.

McQuaid has also appeared in 54 NHL playoff games with the Bruins, where he has posted two goals and six assists with a combined plus-13 rating in 54 matchups. McQuaid was a member of the Bruins' 2011 Stanley Cup winning team.

The 6’5”, 209-pound native of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, was originally selected by Columbus in the second round (55th overall) in the 2005 NHL Entry Draft. On May 16, 2007, McQuaid was acquired by Boston for a fifth round draft pick in the 2007 NHL Entry Draft.

Boston, MA - Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney announced today, June 29, that the Bruins have acquired forward Zac Rinaldo from the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for the Bruins natural third round draft pick in 2017.

Rinaldo skated in 58 games with the Flyers during the 2014-15 campaign, registering one goal and five assists for six points. Rinaldo led the team in penalty minutes with 102.

In total, the 25-year-old has skated in 223 games at the NHL level - all with Philadelphia - notching eight goals and 16 assists for 24 points with 572 penalty minutes. The forward has led the Flyers in penalty minutes the last four seasons. Rinaldo has also skated in 14 NHL postseason games with Philadelphia, racking up 64 penalty minutes.

The 5'11'', 185-pound native of Mississauga, ON was drafted by the Flyers in the sixth round (178th overall) of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft.

“Hopefully they’re going to groom this new brand of Boston Bruin players. If you’re a Bruins fan, player or coach that’s your hope. And these guys are worth their weight in gold in terms of leadership and understanding what it takes to play in the league. I say this because I’m such a big fan of certain players on that team — one of them is Patrice Bergeron, one of them is Brad Marchand, another one is Zdeno Chara, another one is Chris Kelly — so you ask yourself the question: How do they feel right now? And I can’t think they feel very good about it.”

-Pierre McGuire via WEEI where can read more from McGuire on the Bruins.

What a weekend it was for the Boston Bruins, who dealt away Milan Lucic and Dougie Hamilton for a bunch of draft picks.

To an onlooker it looks like the B's are setting up for a rebuild. But Kevin Paul Dupont maintains that they are simply "retooling."

"If you stay on Twitter all day or listen to the fans all day, this is death and destruction," said Dupont. "They still have a handful of very good guys who frankly, some of them are overpaid. I still like Rask, I still like Chara, I still like Bergeron. There's a lot of teams out there that don't have that.

"I don't call it a rebuild because they're still going to end up with five core guys who are here. So it's retooling around those guys."

The day before Round 1 of the NHL draft, Bruins president Cam Neely sounded quite confident the team’s fans were going to like what was about to happen. Neely said Don Sweeney, the new general manager, had big things in the works.

“There’s a lot of things that Don has been working on to not only put us in a position to improve on last year, but also for the future,” Neely said Thursday at Fort Lauderdale Beach.

Well, we’re not sure in what alternate universe subtracting Dougie Hamilton and Milan Lucic is going to improve the B’s for next season.

The Sweeney-Neely regime isn’t off to a great start. The trade of Hamilton to Calgary for a first-round pick and two second-rounders was the shocker — still the talk of the draft yesterday.

Critics in Boston aren’t going to want to hear it, but Sweeney and Co. tried hard to engineer a better outcome — either to keep Hamilton (with an annual offer believed to be in the vicinity of $5 million), or by trading him for more value in draft picks or players. They were close on several deals, but in the end they didn’t happen.

“I think you’ve got to give Donnie [Sweeney] a lot of credit. He just stepped into this role with a lot on his plate. There was a lot going on, and some tough decisions to be made. Personally I’m pretty impressed with how he handled it.

“That’s not to say I’m happy that Doug Hamilton and Milan Lucic are gone. We just lost two pretty good players, but those were moves that probably had to be made with the situation we were in, and the cap and everything else. They decided to make some decisions regarding the future of the Bruins, and they had to make those decisions. I’m a coach that likes to have the support of upper management, so I’m going to support upper management on that.”

-Claude Julien, head coach of the Boston Bruins. More from Joe Haggerty of CSNNE.

... even with Sweeney shipping out two of the Bruins’ top players, the newbie GM insisted he is not rebuilding a team that is just one season removed from a President’s Trophy and two removed from going to the Stanley Cup Final.

“Our expectations are to make the playoffs, absolutely,” Sweeney said Friday night. “With our goaltending, with the core group of our guys, our strength up the middle of the ice — we had players that didn’t score to the level they were supposed to last year. Are we going to continue to look to improve our club? Absolutely.”

The Bruins, though, were not improved on Friday, at least not in the near future. They traded two major talents under the looming threat of free agency and salary-cap constraints. With the re-signing of defenseman Adam McQuaid, the Bruins have $59,341,667 committed to 15 players for the 2015-16 season.

Although the Lucic trade was not a stunner, the Hamilton trade was a surprise. Sweeney met with Hamilton’s agent, J.P. Barry, Wednesday night in Florida, and had made what the general manager termed a “very significant contract offer” to Hamilton, one he believed was in line with comparable players. The Hamilton camp countered with a number that was not in the same region.

“It didn’t lead us to where we thought we’d be able to [sign him] with him being comfortable being part of our group long term, so that sort of changed the course a little bit,” Sweeney said.